The Evolution of Visual Content Marketing: Looking Back 20 Years
2001
Bananas for Banner Ads
The channels of focus for marketers in 2001 were wildly different than what we see today. To better understand the contrast, consider that Internet advertising spend accounted for only 3% of total U.S. ad spending in 2001. Compare that to 20% and 19% for direct mail and newspapers, respectively. Although the world was becoming more comfortable with the internet and technology was advancing rapidly for the time, banner ads were still the go-to advertising vehicle for advertisers, making up 36% of internet ad spend. 2001 was still several years away from the web-centric advertising strategies we see arise in the mid-2000s with the introduction of new platforms like YouTube, Linkedin, and Facebook. In fact, many brands were actively working to distance themselves from the internet in light of the uncertainty left by the dot-com bubble and subsequent slowdown. Although emerging eCommerce technologies and processes seemed revolutionary for the time, it would be many years before we saw the sophisticated, data-driven digital strategies that are commonplace today.
2021
Can you just text it to me?
Spoiler alert: things have changed. Today, digital channels are the primary marketing vehicle for brands of all shapes and sizes. Although, direct mail is seeing a slight comeback as digital becomes more crowded by the day and marketers are looking to the mediums of yore for new opportunities. Throughout the first two decades of the century, we saw direct-to-consumer brands emerge and prove that a channel strategy entirely reliant on digital was, in fact, a feasible way forward. Currently, over 50% of marketers engage in SMS marketing. Back in the day, text messaging was still an emerging technology, compared to today when consumers actively desire to be text messaged by brands. Email has survived and accelerated further since 2001. Today, email is one of the primary channels for marketers looking to circumvent the impending privacy restrictions from big tech players in the advertising placement industry. Mediums that enable personalization at scale are the preferred path for most marketers these days. That's because the ability to connect on a one-to-one basis has proven to be more effective in achieving the desired results when compared to traditional channels like TV and print.
2001
Can we make our logo bigger?
The marketing content of 2001 was built with a one-size-fits-all approach and related closely to the year's most prevalent channels.
Direct mail was the channel of choice for most marketers, resulting in highly polished content focused on specific offers or broad demographic attributes typically rooted in age, gender, and geography. Blogging became more prevalent in 2001, but it was still rare to see consumer-facing brands produce educational blog content for their customers. It was still uncommon to include a website URL in print ads, especially in the automotive and food & beverage industries. The marketing photography of 2001 was highly brand-driven. For example, brands prominently placed their logos where viewers couldn't ignore them, and the subject matter focused on the brand's unique attributes, such as BMW claiming they achieved “perfection” in reference to their new car (notice the complete lack of focus on the customer).
Because it was more challenging to test content and measure its success, many marketing campaigns tried to be consistent, humorous, edgy, or outside the box to create buzz and strong brand recall.
2021
The truth helps
According to Unilever's former Senior Vice-President of Marketing, Marc Mathieu, "marketing used to be about creating a myth and selling it and is now about finding a truth and sharing it." The style of most of today's content is indicative of this statement. The marketing content you see today is all about using truth to connect with consumers. We see this in the popularity of user-generated content, customer reviews, educational content, and customer-centric content. Brands are relying on content that conveys real-life, authentic experiences as a means to resonate with today's consumers who have become skilled in rejecting any marketing messaging that's too promotional or "salesy." In addition to changing consumer preferences, new technology has made it far easier to include the customer in the conversation and use them to generate effective marketing content.
2001
Go big or go home
The strategic motives behind the marketing content created and distributed in 2001 were based primarily on the information available to marketers at the time. SEO strategies were becoming more refined, and Google AdWords had launched the year prior, offering the ability to target customers based on intent and serve personally relevant advertisements. However, the available audience was not as understood or as large as TV, magazine, and OOH advertising channels (now commonly referred to as “old media”.
Marketers prioritized large-scale marketing campaigns that featured celebrity endorsements, outside-the-box marketing messages, and creative that took months (or years) to craft. The objective of these campaigns was to get in front of a large number of people and hope your message and creative resonated with a large enough slice of the pie to deliver a positive return on investment. Because the stakes for failing on these campaigns were much more significant, they demanded most of a company's marketing budgets, personnel, and resources. As social media exploded through the rest of the decade, large-scale, one-to-many campaigns became less popular in favor of tactics that allowed for greater personalization.
2021
Something for everyone
The most popular strategies for marketers today are rooted in the idea of personalization. Consumers have grown accustomed to having personalized, two-way relationships with the brands they do business with. To serve these highly personalized experiences, brands need hordes of customer data. Today's brands prioritize collecting data from their customers to connect with them at relevant times, speak to their specific problems, and provide them with more value along and beyond the buyer's journey.
Much of this data has solidified user-generated content as the optimal marketing content for most consumer-facing brands. The peer validation and social proof of user-generated content now replace the aspirational motivations of celebrity endorsements of 2001. With today's technology, marketers and data scientists alike can pinpoint specific marketing content types that will most likely drive the desired action throughout the buyer's journey. However, with the recent privacy updates from the companies (primarily Google and Apple) that essentially built the highly-targeted and cost-effective advertising products marketers survived on for the past 15 years, the future holds some uncertainty. Still, most experts agree that rich customer data and personalized experiences will be the way forward regardless of tightening privacy restrictions.
2001
Work it for me, Britney
As previously touched on, businesses in 2001 built marketing campaigns that cast a wide net to capture the attention of as many people within a target audience as possible. Because of this, the primary messaging and creative content was developed and refined over months. Marketing departments brought in models, celebrities, highly-regarded photographers, and elaborate sets to capture the essence of the brand in a way that would convince consumers that they needed the brand's products to feel a certain way or achieve a particular image. Marketers repurposed highly-polished, curated photography across websites, magazines, and billboards - produced with little concern for the channel it would eventually appear on. Graphic design was a popular tool but still required expertise and training to create even the most basic designs. Content turnaround times felt like eons compared to the speed of today.
2021
Smartphones: a marketer’s best friend
Every time you snap a photo on your iPhone and post it to your Instagram, you're humiliating the content production process of 2001. A post of equal quality in 2001 would've required an expensive, high-tech camera and photo-editing software - both of which come standard on basically every smartphone today. At the beginning of the millennium, art departments and marketing departments were siloed.
Today, brand and performance marketers can use the technology at their disposal to create high-quality, campaign-specific marketing assets in a matter of minutes. On top of that, brands today rely on their customers to produce the authentic marketing collateral they need in the form of user-generated content.